The Dedalus Book of Absinthe

by Baker, Phil

  Praise for The Dedalus Book of Absinthe:

  “James Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake described a character as ‘absintheminded’, while lesser punsters spoke of absinthe making ‘the tart grow fonder’. It reaches across time, this ‘potent concoction of eccentricity and beauty’. Alluring, then informative and witty.”

  Time Out

  “Dwarfish Bohemian psychopaths in stove-pipe hats, ageless Louisiana vampires, Victorian books bound in human skin, fin-de-siècle brothels, strange Goth subcultures and lice- ridden poets: yep, it’s a history of absinthe. There’s cultural history by the bucket load, possibly the worst Victorian poetry ever to have seen the light of day for a century, along with the full story of today’s absinthe boom … An indispensable guide for the contemporary absintheur.”

  Class: the magazine of bar culture

  “literate and cheerfully squalid … a model of popular cultural history … brilliant”

  Gary Lachman in The Fortean Times

  “engaging, curious, and gruesomely hilarious”

  Andrew Jefford in The Evening Standard

  “For someone who actually likes the beastly stuff, Phil Baker writes very well and drily … I greatly recommend the tasting notes of current brands at the end …”

  Philip Hensher in The Spectator

  “informative and hair-raising”

  Roy Herbert in The New Scientist

  “… packed with enjoyable anecdotes and eccentric absintheurs, and reveals why it has been the most demonised of all alcoholic drinks”

  The Sunday Times

  “Absinthe is a brilliant book full of arresting facts and new illuminations.”

  Gay Times

  “Phil Baker’s consistently enjoyable study is meticulously researched, liberal with its quotations, comprehensive in its range, and light in its telling.”

  The Literary Review

  “This is all great stuff, and sets us up for the extended coda of the modern absinthe revival – both in its American gothic variant of New Orleans and Anne Rice vampires and its British co-option into the hell-bent twenty-first century drink-drug cocktail culture. Turning finally from the drinkers to the drink, we get the bottom line on whether the wormwood in absinthe makes it a more trippy intoxication that other spirits, or more toxic (or, as it turns out, both). Rounded out with an appendix of classic absinthe texts, another of road-tests of the currently available brands, and plenty of notes and sources, this is a very appealing package – tastier, definitely cheaper and probably more illuminating than the drink itself.’’

  Mike Jay in Black Ice

  “One of the most fascinating themes in this witty, erudite and desperately poignant study is that of the cultural war waged between England and France at the end of the 19th century. English moralists would wax not very eloquent on the sapping effects of absinthe on the susceptible French soul, always uncomfortably aware that the French were producing writers and artists of a calibre unmatched in England.”

  Murrough O’Brien in the Independent on Sunday

  “Still, as alcohol, absinthe is harsh, potent stuff. If only the booze went down as easily as the book. The Dedalus Book of Absinthe, ably written by Phil Baker, is a well-researched and entertaining wealth of fact and fancy, anecdotes and information about the Green Fairy. Interspersed with historical accounts of absinthe production and legislation are debauched accounts excerpted from the writings of famous debauchees, among them Hemingway, Picasso and Van Gogh. Also surveyed are the rituals of libation, including digressions on the appropriate hardware.”

  Prague Pill

  “This splendid book also discusses the rituals and modus operandi of absinthe drinking, with a short chapter on the medical properties and effects of the drink, and includes a collection of apposite French poetry and prose. It also includes a useful appendix where current brands are tested and given a ‘a Dowson rating’. All in all, a most entertaining and informative read, for which Mr. Baker is to be commended.”

  The Chap Magazine

  Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited

  24-26, St Judith's Lane, Sawtry, Cambs, PE28 5XE

  Email: info@dedalusbooks.com

  www.dedalusbooks.com

  ISBN printed book 978 1 903517 40 6

  ISBN e-book 978 1 907650 47 5

  Dedalus is distributed in the USA and Canada by SCB Distributors

  15608 South New Century Drive, Gardena, CA 90248

  email: info@scbdistributors.com web: www.scbdistributors.com

  Dedalus is distributed in Australia by Peribo Pty Ltd.

  58, Beaumont Road, Mount Kuring-gai, N.S.W. 2080

  email: info@peribo.com.au

  Publishing History

  First published by Dedalus in 2001, reprinted 2002

  First premium edition 2006

  First e-book edition 2011

  The Dedalus Book of Absinthe © Phil Baker 2001

  The right of Phil Baker to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patent Act, 1988

  Printed in Finland by Bookwell

  Typeset by Refine Catch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A C.I.P. listing for this book is available on request.

  THE AUTHOR

  Phil Baker reviews regularly for a number of papers including The Sunday Times and The Times Literary Supplement. The author of a book on Beckett and a short history of psychogeography, “Secret City”, he has just completed a biography of Dennis Wheatley and is researching a study of the artist, Austin Osman Spare.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue Three Coffins in the Morning

  Chapter One What does absinthe mean?

  Vice – Marie Corelli – the Sublime – Aleister Crowley – George Saintsbury – the part for the whole

  Chapter Two The 1890s

  Enoch Soames at the Café Royal – Fleet Street nights – Arthur Symons – Oscar Wilde – the backlash – The Green Carnation – Smithers and the Savoy

  Chapter Three The Life and Death of Ernest Dowson

  Stranger in a Strange Land – faithful in his fashion – “like a protoplasm in the embryo of a troglodyte” – Jekyll and Hyde – a night out in the East End – Paris and religion – peacefully in Catford – Yeats is mistaken

  Chapter Four Meanwhile in France

  Alfred de Musset – Baudelaire – Verlaine – Rimbaud

  Chapter Five Genius Unrewarded

  Communication with Other Planets – Strindberg the alchemist – Villiers de L’Isle Adam – Alfred Jarry – a Man of Letters

  Chapter Six From Antiquity to the Green Hour

  The useful herb – bitterness – a tonic is invented – the Bat d’Af – bourgeois habits under the Second Empire – the Green Hour – Bohemia – inspiration

  Chapter Seven Before the Ban

  Bad scenes at the Absinthe Hotel – female troubles – Zola, Manet, and Degas – Orpen – absinthe and the workers – ‘it kills you but it makes you live’ – absinthism and the spectre of degeneration – sad news about Toulouse-Lautrec – Picasso – not before time

  Chapter Eight After the Ban

  Nostalgia – death in America – Hemingway – Harry Crosby – American Gothic – the English are amused

  Chapter Nine The Absinthe Revival

  Prague – The Idler – Johnny Depp has need of a crate – an open secret –
mixology – the French are not amused – the birth of La Fée – the Charenton Omnibus revisited – laissez faire – dissenting voices – a word from Mr. Social Control

  Chapter Ten The Rituals of Absinthe

  Fire and water – the louche – modus operandi – a pleasure in itself – the absinthe professors – the language of absinthe – more classic methods – Valentin has a better idea

  Chapter Eleven What Does Absinthe Do?

  A different experience – placebos and learned intoxication – absinthism revisited – thujone – the strange case of Vincent Van Gogh – recreational wormwood abuse – the mystery solved – coca wine and the speedball effect – ‘alcohol kills you slowly’

  Appendix One Some absinthe texts

  Appendix Two Modern brands tested

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Toulouse-Lautrec’s absinthe cane. Photo Musée

  Toulouse-Lautrec, Albi.

  Prologue

  Three Coffins in the Morning

  News of a particularly ugly tragedy swept across the European headlines in the month of August 1905. A thirty one year old man named Jean Lanfray, a Swiss peasant of French stock, had drunk two glasses of absinthe, taken his old army rifle out of the cupboard, and shot his pregnant wife in the head. When his four year old daughter Rose appeared in the doorway to see what was happening, he shot her too. He then went into the room next door, where his two year old daughter Blanche was lying in her cot, and blasted her as well. At this point he tried to shoot himself but botched it, and staggered across the yard to fall asleep holding Blanche’s dead body.

  Next morning, now in police custody, Lanfray was taken to see the corpses of his wife and children. They were laid out dead – and here creeps in the kind of horribly picturesque touch that might have pleased Dickens – in three differently sized coffins. It must have been a sobering sight.

  The public reaction to the Lanfray case was extraordinary, and it focused on just one detail. Never mind the fact that Lanfray was a thoroughgoing alcoholic, and that in the day preceding the murder he had consumed not only the two absinthes before work – hours, in fact, before the tragedy – but a crème de menthe, a cognac, six glasses of wine to help his lunch down, another glass of wine before leaving work, a cup of coffee with brandy in it, a litre of wine on getting home, and then another coffee with marc in it. Never mind all that, or the fact that he was known to drink up to five litres of wine a day. People were in no doubt. It must have been the absinthe that did it. Within weeks, a petition had been signed by local people. 82,450 of them. They wanted absinthe banned in Switzerland, and in the following year it was. No drink, not even gin in Hogarth’s London, has ever had such a bad reputation.

  Chapter One

  What Does Absinthe Mean?

  L’Absinthe by Benasset. Copyright Musée Carnavalet.

  “You tell me you have become an absintheur – do you know what that means?”

  Marie Corelli, Wormwood

  What does absinthe mean? It is one of the strongest alcoholic drinks ever made, with an additional psychotropic potential from the wormwood it contains, but the idea of absinthe has developed a mythology all of its own. Even the word has a strange ring to it. It barely sounds like an alcoholic drink at all, although it does sound like a substance of some kind, recalling amaranth – a never-fading flower symbolising immortality – and nepenthe, a sorrow-lulling drink or drug, and also a carnivorous plant.

  As we shall see, wickedness is often to the fore when people talk about absinthe, particularly in the English-speaking world. But it isn’t quite sin that we’re dealing with here, although it’s somewhere in the same spectrum. Absinthe doesn’t necessarily have the creeping luxuriousness of sin. It’s too powerful, for one thing. Absinthe – particularly in France – has often meant something a bit more brutal and degraded: it isn’t so much about sin as vice.

  Having begun as a tonic in Switzerland at the close of the eighteenth century, absinthe became associated with the French colonial army in Algeria by the middle of the nineteenth. Taking a glass of absinthe became respectable and almost universal bourgeois habit under the gilded Second Empire, but by the Empire’s end it was already developing two rather more particular and dangerous meanings. It was associated on the one hand with poets, painters, and Bohemianism in general, and on the other with working class alcoholism (particularly after the horrors of 1870–71, when the Franco-Prussian War was followed by the uprising and annihilation of the revolutionary Paris Commune). The absinthe problem grew worse in the 1880s, when failing grape crops resulted in absinthe becoming cheaper than wine. Eventually these meanings came together at the junction where Bohemia meets Skid Row, spelling out a generalized ruin for artists and workers alike. Absinthe – no longer “the green fairy” but “the green witch” and the “queen of poisons” – became the demonized object of a moral panic. It was by now strongly associated with insanity, and it became popularly known as “the Charenton omnibus”, after the lunatic asylum at Charenton. “If absinthe isn’t banned,” a French prohibition campaigner wrote, “our country will rapidly become an immense padded cell where half the French will be occupied putting straitjackets on the other half.”

  The French did ban absinthe in 1915, scapegoating it for the national alcohol problem, and for the French army’s unreadiness for the First World War. But it lived on in Spain and Eastern Europe, and now, in the aftermath of a new fin-de-siècle, absinthe is back, bringing all its connotations with it. For three recent writers on the subject, absinthe has a spread of meanings: for Regina Nadelson it suggests “sweet decadence” and “a history rich in carnal and narcotic connotation”, while as a social problem, it was “the cocaine of the nineteenth century”. For Barnaby Conrad its history is one of “murder, madness and despair”, and it “symbolized anarchy, a deliberate denial of normal life and its obligations”. And for Doris Lanier, absinthe was “associated with inspiration and freedom and became a symbol of French decadence” – so much so that for her the word “absinthe” evokes “thoughts of narcotic intrigue, euphoria, eroticism, and decadent sensuality”.

  And in addition to all that, absinthe will always be associated with the old fin-de-siècle: the 1890s of Oscar Wilde and Ernest Dowson at the Café Royal, and the French symbolists who preceded the English Decadence, such as Verlaine and Rimbaud. In London, before the current revival, attitudes to absinthe were always bound up with impressions of Paris, and with what Aleister Crowley says somewhere is “the average Cockney’s idea of Paris as a very wicked place”. It is an attitude to France and all things French that lasted well into the second half of the twentieth century. Take Lou Reed’s line “like a dirty French novel – ooohhh” on the Velvet Underground track ‘Some Kinda Love’, or Patti Smith on the cover of the Smith fanzine White Stuff, posing with a lurid pulp edition of Montmartre writer Francis Carco’s novel Depravity.†

  Depravity is certainly the keynote of Marie Corelli’s 1890 anti-absinthe novel Wormwood, a book so sublimely over the top it makes The Phantom of the Opera look like Pride and Prejudice. It tells the story of Gaston Beauvais, a once decent and intelligent man who becomes a complete moral leper through his fatal encounter with absinthe, and brings total ruin upon himself and all around him. “Let me be mad”, cries Beauvais:

  … mad with the madness of Absinthe, the wildest, most luxurious madness in the world! Vive la folie! Vive l’amour! Vive l’animalisme! Vive le Diable!

  Corelli soon makes it clear that aside from the absinthe, Gaston has another filthy personal problem. He is French.

  The morbidness of the modern French mind is well known and universally admitted, even by the French themselves; the open atheism, heartlessness, flippancy, and flagrant immorality of the whole modern French school of thought is unquestioned. If a crime of more than usual cold-blooded atrocity is committed, it generally dates from Paris, or near it; – if a book or a picture is pr
oduced that is confessedly obscene, the author or artist is, in nine cases out of ten, discovered to be a Frenchman.

  […] There are, no doubt, many causes for the wretchedly low standard of moral responsibility and fine feeling displayed by the Parisians of today – but I do not hesitate to say that one of those causes is undoubtedly the reckless Absinthe-mania, which pervades all classes, rich and poor alike. Everyone knows that in Paris the men have certain hours set apart for the indulgence of this fatal craze as religiously as Mussulmans have their hours for prayer… The effects of its rapid working on the human brain are beyond all imagination horrible and incurable, and no romanticist can exaggerate the terrific reality of the evil.

  It must also be remembered that in the many French cafés and restaurants which have recently sprung up in London, Absinthe is always to be obtained at its customary low price, – French habits, French fashions, French books, French pictures, are particularly favoured by the English, and who can predict that French drug-drinking shall not also become à la mode in Britain?

  Having been introduced to “the Fairy with the Green Eyes” by his friend Gessonex, a mad artist, Beauvais embraces destruction by way of a melodramatically horrible descent that takes him to the Paris morgue and the cemetery at Père Lachaise en route. “You tell me you have become an absintheur,” says Gaston’s father “do you know what that means?”

  “I believe I do,” I replied indifferently. “It means, in the end, death.”

  “Oh, if it meant only death!” he exclaimed passionately… . “But it means more than this – it means crime of the most revolting character – it means brutality, cruelty, apathy, sensuality, and mania! Have you realised the doom you create for yourself…?”